All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  So I threw it into the basket on the city desk and went back to write the Community Chest story.

  The Barnacle never said a thing to me and I didn't say a thing to him; you could have knocked my eyes off with a stick when the kid brought the papers up from the pressroom, and there was my brownie story spread across the top of page one in an eight-column feature strip.

  No one mentioned it to me except Jo Ann, who came along and patted me on the head and said she was proud of me — although Cod knows why she should have been.

  Then the Barnacle sent me out on another one of his wild-goose chases concerning someone who was supposed to be building a homemade atomic pile in his back yard. It turned out that this fellow is an old geezer who, at one time, had built a perpetual motion machine that didn't work. Once I found that out, I was so disgusted that I didn't even go back to the office, but went straight home instead.

  I rigged up a block and tackle, had some trouble what with no one to help me, but I finally got the boat up on the blocks. Then I drove to a Utile village at the end of the lake and bought paint not only for the boat, but the cottage as well. I felt pretty good about making such a fine start on all the work I should do that fall.

  The next morning when I got to the office, I found the place in an uproar. The switchboard had been clogged all night and it still looked like a Christmas tree. One of the operators had passed out, and they were trying to bring her to.

  The Barnacle had a wild gleam in his eye, and his necktie was all askew. When he saw me, he took me firmly by the arm and led me to my desk and sat me down. "Now, damn you, get to work!" he yelled and he dumped a bale of notes down in front of me.

  "What's going on?" I asked.

  "It's that brownie deal of yours," he yelled. "Thousands of people are calling in. All of them have brownies; they've been helped by brownies; some of them have even seen brownies."

  "What about the milk?" I asked.

  "Milk? What milk?"

  "Why, the milk they should set out for them."

  "How do I know?" he said. "Why don't you call up some of the milk companies and find out?"

  That is just what I did — and, so help me Hannah, the milk companies were slowly going crazy. Every driver had come racing back to get extra milk, because most of their customers were ordering an extra quart or so. They were lined up for blocks outside the stations waiting for new loads and the milk supply was running low.

  There weren't any of us in the newsroom that morning who did anything but write brownie copy. We filled the paper with it — all sorts of stories about how the brownies had been helping people. Except, of course, they hadn't known it was brownies helping them until they read my story. They'd just thought that it was good luck.

  When the first edition was in, we sat back and sort of caught our breath — although the calls still were coming in — and I swear my typewriter still was hot from the copy I'd turned out.

  The papers came up, and each of us took our copy and started to go through it, when we heard a roar from J.H.'s office. A second later, J. H. came out himself, waving a paper in his fist, his face three shades redder than a brand-new fire truck.

  He practically galloped to the city desk and he flung the paper down in front of the Barnacle and hit it with his fist. "What do you mean?" he shouted. "Explain yourself. Making us ridiculous!"

  "But, J. H., I thought it was a good gag and —»

  "Brownies!" J. H. snorted.

  "We got all those calls," said Barnacle Bill. "They still are coming in. And —»

  "That's enough," J. H. thundered. "You're fired!" He swung around from the city desk and looked straight at me. "You're the one who started it," he said. "You're fired, too."

  I got up from my chair and moved over to the city desk. "We'll be back a little later," I told J. H., "to collect our severance pay."

  He flinched a little at that, but he didn't back up any. The Barnacle picked up an ash tray off his desk and let it fall. It hit the floor and broke. He dusted off his hands. "Come on, Mark," he said; "I'll buy you a drink."

  We went over to the corner. Joe brought us a bottle and a couple of glasses, and we settled down to business.

  Pretty soon some of the other boys started dropping in. They'd have a drink or two with us and then go back to work. It was their way of showing us they were sorry the way things had turned out. They didn't say anything, but they kept dropping in. There never was a time during the entire afternoon when there wasn't someone drinking with us. The Barnacle and I took on quite a load.

  We talked over this brownie business and at first we were a little skeptical about it, laying the situation more or less to public gullibility. But the more we thought about it, and the more we drank, the more we began to believe there might really be brownies. For one thing, good luck just doesn't come in hunks the way it appeared to have come to this town of ours in the last few weeks. Good luck is apt to scatter itself around a bit — and while it may run in streaks, it's usually pretty thin. But here it seemed that hundreds — if not thousands — of persons had been visited by good luck.

  By the middle of the afternoon, we were fairly well agreed there might be something to this brownie business. Then, of course, we tried to figure out who the brownies were, and why they were helping people.

  "You know what I think," said Barnacle. "I think they're aliens. People from the stars. Maybe they're the ones who have been flying all these saucers."

  "But why would aliens want to help us?" I objected. "Sure, they'd want to watch us and find out all they could; and after a while, they might try to make contact with us. They might even be willing to help us, but if they were they'd want to help us as a race, not as individuals."

  "Maybe," the Barnacle suggested, "they're just busybodies. There are humans like that. Psychopathic dogooders, always sticking in their noses, never letting well enough alone."

  "I don't think so," I argued back at him. "If they are frying to help us, I'd guess it's a religion with them. Like the old friars who wandered all over Europe in the early days. Like the Good Samaritan. Like the Salvation Army."

  But he wouldn't have it that way. "They're busybodies," he insisted. "Maybe they come from a surplus economy, a planet where all the work is done by machines and there is more than enough of everything for everyone. Maybe there isn't anything left for anyone to do — and you know yourself that a man has to have something to keep him occupied, something to do so he can think that he is important."

  Then along about five o'clock Jo Ann came in. It had been her day off and she hadn't known what had happened until someone from the office phoned her. So she'd come right over.

  She was plenty sore at me, and she wouldn't listen to me when I tried to explain that at a time like this a man had to have a drink or two. She got me out of there and out back to my car and drove me to her place. She fed me black coffee and finally gave me something to eat and along about eight o'clock or so she figured I'd sobered up enough to try driving home.

  I took it easy and I made it, but I had an awful head and I remembered that I didn't have a job. Worst of all, I was probably tagged for life as the man who had dreamed up the brownie hoax. There was no doubt that the wire services had picked up the story, and that it had made front page in most of the papers coast to coast. No doubt, the radio and television commentators were doing a lot of chuckling at it.

  My cottage stands up on a sharp little rise above the lake, a sort of hog's back between the lake and road, and there's no road up to it. I had to leave my car alongside the road at the foot of the rise, and walk up to the place.

  I walked along, my head bent a little so I could see the path in the moonlight, and I was almost to the cottage before I heard a sound that made me raise my head.

  And there they were.

  They had rigged up a scaffold and there were four of them on it, painting the cottage madly. Three of them were up on the roof replacing the bricks that had been knocked out of the chimney. They had
storm windows scattered all over the place and were furiously applying putty to them. And you could scarcely see the boat, there were so many of them slapping paint on it.

  I stood there staring at them, with my jaw hanging on my breastbone, when I heard a sudden — swish- and stepped quickly to one side. About a dozen of them rushed by, reeling out the hose, running down the hill with it. Almost in a shorter time than it takes to tell it, they were washing the car.

  They didn't seem to notice me. Maybe it was because they were so busy they didn't have the time to — or it might have been just that it wasn't proper etiquette to take notice of someone when they were helping him.

  They looked a lot like the brownies that you see pictured in the children's books, but there were differences. They wore pointed caps, all right, but when I got close to one of them who was busy puttying, I could see that it was no cap at all. His head ran up to a point, and that the tassle on the top of it was no tassle of a cap, but a tuft of hair or feathers — I couldn't make out which. They wore coats with big fancy buttons on them, but I got the impression — I don't know how — that they weren't buttons, but something else entirely. And instead of the big sloppy clown-type shoes they're usually shown as wearing, they had nothing on their feet.

  They worked hard and fast; they didn't waste a minute. They didn't walk, but ran. And there were so many of them.

  Suddenly they were finished. The boat was painted, and so was the cottage. The puttied, painted storm windows were leaned against the trees. The hose was dragged up the hill and neatly coiled again.

  I saw that they were finishing and I tried to call them all together so that I could thank them, but they paid no attention to me. And when they were finished, they were gone. I was left standing, all alone — with the newly painted cottage shining in the moonlight and the smell of paint heavy in the air.

  I suppose I wasn't exactly sober, despite the night air and all the coffee Jo Ann had poured into me. If I had been cold, stone sober I might have done it better; I might have thought of something. As it was, I'm afraid I bungled it.

  I staggered into the house, and the outside door seemed a little hard to shut. When I looked for the reason, I saw it had been weather-stripped.

  With the lights on, I looked around — and in all the time I'd been there the place had never been so neat. There wasn't a speck of dust on anything and all the metal shone. All the pots and pans were neatly stacked in place; all the clothing I had left strewn around had been put away; all the books were lined straight within the shelves, and the magazines were where they should be instead of just thrown anywhere.

  I managed to get into bed, and I tried to think about it; but someone came along with a heavy mallet and hit me on the head and that was the last I knew until I was awakened by a terrible racket.

  I got to it as fast as I could.

  "What is it now?" I snarled, which is no way to answer a phone, but was the way I felt.

  It was J.H. "What's the matter with you?" he yelled. "Why aren't you at the office? What do you mean by…"

  "Just a minute, J. H.; don't you remember? You canned me yesterday."

  "Now, Mark," he said, "you wouldn't hold that against me, would you? We were all excited…"

  "— I- wasn't excited," I told him.

  "Look," he said, "I need you, There's someone here to see you."

  "All right," I said and hung up.

  I didn't hurry any; I took my time. If J. H. needed me, if there was someone there to see me, both of them could wait. I turned on the coffee maker and took a shower; after the shower and coffee, I felt almost human.

  I was crossing the yard, heading for the path down to the car, when I saw something that stopped me like a shot.

  There were tracks in the dust, tracks all over the place-exactly the kind of tracks I'd seen in the flower bed underneath the window at the Clayborne estate. I squatted down and looked closely at them to make sure there was no mistake and there couldn't be. They were the self-same tracks.

  They were brownie tracks!

  I stayed there for a long time, squatting beside the tracks and thinking that now it was all believable because there was no longer any room for disbelief.

  The nurse had been right; there had been something in the room that night Mrs. Clayborne died. It was a mercy, the old gardener said, his thoughts and speech all fuzzed with the weariness and the basic simplicity of the very old. An act of mercy, a good deed, for the old lady had been dying hard, no hope for her.

  And if there were good deeds in death, there were as well in life. In an operation such as this, the surgeon had told me, there are so many factors that no one can take the credit. It was a miracle, he'd said, but don't you quote me on it.

  And someone — no cleaning woman, but someone or something else — had messed up the notes of the physicist and in the messing of them had put together two pages out of several hundred — two pages that tied together and made sense.

  Coincidence? I asked myself. Coincidence that a woman died and that a boy lived, and that a researcher got a clue he'd otherwise have missed? No, not coincidence when there was a track beneath a window and papers scattered from beneath a paperweight.

  And — I'd almost forgotten — Jo Ann's old lady who sat rocking happily because all her old dead friends had come to visit her. There were even times when senility might become a very kindness.

  I straightened up and went down to the car. As I drove into town I kept thinking about the magic touch of kindness from the stars or if, perhaps, there might be upon this earth, coexistent with the human race, another race that had a different outlook and a different way of life. A race, perhaps, that had tried time and time again to ally itself with the humans and each time had been rejected and driven into hiding — sometimes by ignorance and superstition and again by a too-brittle knowledge of what was impossible. A race, perhaps, that might be trying once again.

  J. H. was waiting for me, looking exactly like a cat sitting serenely inside a bird cage, with feathers on his whiskers. With him was a high brass flyboy, who had a rainbow of decorations spread across his jacket and eagles on his shoulders. They shone so bright and earnestly that they almost sparkled.

  "Mark, this is Colonel Duncan," said J. H. "He'd like to have a word with you."

  The two of us shook hands and the colonel was more affable than one would have expected him to be. Then J. H. left us in his office and shut the door behind him. The two of us sat down and each of us sort of measured up the other. I don't know how the colonel felt, but I was ready to admit I was uncomfortable. I wondered what I might have done and what the penalty might be.

  "I wonder, Lathrop," said the colonel, "if you'd mind telling me exactly how it happened.

  "How you found out about the brownies?"

  "I didn't find out about them, Colonel; it was just a gag."

  I told him about the Barnacle shooting off his mouth about no one on the staff ever showing any initiative, and how I'd dreamed up the brownie story to get even with him. And how the Barnacle had got even with me by running it.

  But that didn't satisfy the colonel. "There must be more to it than that," he said.

  I could see that he'd keep at me until I'd told it, anyhow; and while he hadn't said a word about it, I kept seeing images of the Pentagon, and the chiefs of staff, and Project Saucer — or whatever they might call it now — and the FBI, and a lot of other unpleasant things just over his left shoulder.

  So I came clean with him. I told him all of it and a lot of it, I granted, sounded downright silly.

  But he didn't seem to think that it was silly. "And what do you think about all this?"

  "I don't know," I told him. "They might come from outer space, or…"

  He nodded quietly. "We've known for some time now that there have been landings. This is the first time they've ever deliberately called attention to themselves."

  "What do they want, Colonel? What are they aiming at?"

  "I wish I knew."<
br />
  Then he said very quietly, "Of course, if you should write anything about this, I shall simply deny it. That will leave you in a most peculiar position at best."

  I don't know how much more he might have told me — maybe quite a bit. But right then the phone rang. I picked it up and answered; it was for the colonel.

  He said "Yes," and listened. He didn't say another word. He got a little white around the gills; then he hung up the phone.

  He sat there, looking sick.

  "What's the matter, Colonel?"

  "That was the field," he told me. "It happened just a while ago. They came out of nowhere and swarmed all over the plane — polished it and cleaned it and made it spic and span, both inside and out. The men couldn't do a thing about it. They just had to stand and watch."

  I grinned. "There's nothing bad about that, Colonel. They were just being good to you."

  "You don't know the half of it," he said. "When they got it all prettied up, they painted a brownie on the nose."

  That's just about all there's to it as far as the brownies are concerned. The job they did on the colonel's plane was, actually, the sole public appearance that they made. But it was enough to serve their purpose if publicity was what they wanted — a sort of visual clincher, as it were. One of our photographers — a loopy character by the name of Charles, who never was where you wanted him when you wanted him, but nevertheless seemed to be exactly on the spot when the unusual or disaster struck — was out at the airport that morning. He wasn't supposed to be there; he was supposed to be covering a fire, which turned out luckily to be no more than a minor blaze. How he managed to wind up at the airport even he, himself, never was able to explain. But he was there and he got the pictures of the brownies polishing up the plane — not only one or two pictures, but a couple dozen of them, all the plates he had. Another thing — he got the pictures with a telescopic lens. He'd put it in his bag that morning by mistake; he'd never carried it before. After that one time he never was without it again and, to my knowledge, never had another occasion where he had to use it.